A COLD LIGHT.(photojournalism)(Sebastio Salgado)

The Amazonas photographic agency is in a neighborhood of rising elegance and property prices in northeastern Paris, in a former coal warehouse on the Saint-Martin canal. Just in front of the building, a steeply arched wrought-iron footbridge extends over the water to the Hotel du Nord, where Marcel Carne set his melancholy film of the same name. Inside the agency, which features floors of polished hardwood that were imported from Brazil, half a million postcard-size work prints are immaculately arranged in smooth-running drawers. Six people work here, including two full-time photographic printers, each with his own darkroom.

Sebastiao Salgado, the Brazilian-born photojournalist known for beautiful black-and-white photographs of people living difficult lives, is the agency's only photographer. In the world of photojournalism, a place where his fame and magisterial rhythm of work give him a singular status, Salgado has the added distinction of being his own producer: he owns the factory. And although Salgado often works abroad, when he does return to his family in Paris he walks each day to Amazonas, from an apartment fifteen minutes away.

One morning a few weeks ago, Salgado was in the basement of the office, where the sound of continuously running water--prints were being rinsed nearby--gave the room the feel of compulsory calm found in the lobbies of some expensive hotels. On a wall in front of him was a poster-size reproduction of a photograph he had taken in Serra Pelada, a Brazilian gold mine, in 1986. It showed thousands of men--sacrificial and single-minded, each apparently working for himself--covering every surface of a great open pit, hauling dirt-filled sacks on makeshift ladders. A silvery sheen of mud covers the men, making it nearly impossible to tell that they are wearing modern clothes. A contemporary image saturated in the long history of South American gold prospecting and in a longer history of human toil, it comes from a series of extraordinary photographs taken at the same mine which have been described as "evocative of the masterworks of Pieter Brueghel and Cecil B. De Mille." Fusing fact to myth, past to present, the images helped propel Salgado's already successful career to something far loftier, much the way Bono is something more than a pop star. Salgado, a former economist, has become an architect of photojournalistic projects with a global reach, an icon of social conscience, a kind of solo branch of the United Nations.

A broad-shouldered, Picasso-ish man of sixty-one, he was wearing jeans and a V-necked cashmere sweater over a checked shirt. He had a penknife in a leather pouch fixed to his belt, and gold-rimmed half-moon reading glasses on a chain around his neck. His head is shaved bald, and his face is unlined; you can therefore find your gaze skidding off him, or snagging on his bushy eyebrows, which rise and fall in the beseeching way of a conductor squeezing sad and delicate sounds out of an orchestra. Lelia Wanick Salgado, his wife of more than thirty years, the editor of his books and his exhibitions, and the director of Amazonas, was consulting with Salgado about a future retrospective in Paris. She is a slim woman with a smoker's dark-textured voice; she was dressed all in black, and at one point in the conversation her husband spun her slowly around, picking pieces of lint from her clothes; when he was done, she kissed him on the lips.

Lelia went to the office space upstairs, where Sebastiao's photographs are sold to magazines, and where they are collected in vast books and travelling exhibitions, and where the phone calls are about honorary degrees and invitations to sit on panels and accept awards. ("We have two talents and they are complementary," she later said. "He knows how to take photographs and I know how to exploit them.") Downstairs, Salgado sat at a table with a longtime colleague, Francoise Piffard. They had boxes of small, freshly printed photographs in front of them--images from his latest long-term, self-assigned project, "Genesis." For the first time, Salgado is photographing wild animals instead of people, in an enterprise that carries at least a hint of the idea that he is owed a vacation. He is visiting environments unchanged by human progress, after more than thirty years spent photographing miserably changing environments, and people in the middle of economic or political upheaval. Salgado started "Genesis" last year, photographing giant tortoises in the Galapagos Islands, gorillas in central Africa, whales off the Argentine coast. He expects to finish in 2012.

Salgado had just returned from Antarctica, and before him were dozens of small photographs of penguins feeding their offspring by regurgitation, jamming their beaks down into the throats of their young; there were also glaciers, and icebergs, and albatrosses looking directly into the camera. "Nice, nice pictures. Incredible dignity they had," Salgado said of the birds. His first language is Portuguese, and he speaks both French and English with an accent that becomes stronger if he gets agitated or excited; in English, "refugees" becomes "hefugees," for example.

The work prints needed to be divided into two piles: yes and no. Such sifting would eventually lead to a final selection of about fifty images, which would be presented to magazines. In an action repeated every minute or so, Salgado held up two photographs with a similar composition, often taken moments apart, and he and Piffard would try to find a weaker print to reject, with Salgado saying, "I wish the sky was a bit more dramatic," or, "I don't think that's too horrible," or enthusing, "That's beautiful, no? That is the idea, how close we can be to Genesis, yet in our times!" Piffard wore magnifying goggles, and peered forward with pursed lips, like a jeweller; at times she questioned a composition, or simply said, "I don't think so." Salgado decided on rejects only grudgingly, slapping them down like a frustrated poker player. When he put neither print into the reject pile (which was growing more slowly than the other), Piffard said, "Oh, Sebastiao," disapprovingly.